


Vesica Pisces

by Bjorn_Haraldson



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mutants, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Athelnar - Freeform, Empathy, Escape, Everyone is a mutant, Human Experimentation, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Mutants, Other, Prison Escape, Where is all the angsty ragnar, empath!athelstan, kind of, mutant!bjorn, mutant!ragnar, seriously
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-14 03:13:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29910567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bjorn_Haraldson/pseuds/Bjorn_Haraldson
Summary: Athelstan has been working for the Mutant Emancipation and Relief Syndicate for several years, mostly useful in the infirmaries as a trained nurse and an empath to treat their troubled and traumatised patients. Sometimes, though, he was required to participate in the non-combative reconnaissance missions.Usually, they went fine.Until he finds himself locked up in a nameless mutant detention facility with two other MERS operatives and a quiet man with blue eyes.
Relationships: Athelstan/Ragnar Lothbrok, Lagertha/Ragnar Lothbrok
Comments: 12
Kudos: 7





	1. Detained

**Author's Note:**

> So, I am super excited about this but I'm not sure how it will be received...there are lots of people who love to whump on Athelstan, but there is such a tiny amount of content that really recognises Ragnar's potential for angst! Maybe I'm overcompensating, but who cares.
> 
> Not sure when/if this will be updated. I have a little bit written already, but my muse comes and goes. We will see!
> 
> Anyway, Enjoy!

Athelstan sighed and fell back against the wall of his small cell, staring into the pale fluorescent light.

_What a disaster._

How could it have gone so wrong? It wasn’t even a conflict mission; they’d just had to count the guards outside of the facility.

Count. The damned. Guards.

And now they’d been captured. With the label of ‘resistance fighters’ and as mutants, Athelstan had absolutely no doubt that they’d be here for years. Hopeless, he rubbed soothing circles into his temples with one hand; they’d be lucky if they weren’t in here for the rest of their lives.

“Motherfucking bastards- “ The cells were some sort of clear material (perhaps shatterproof glass or Perspex) and he room itself was small, so other than the sides built into the corner of wall he was able to clearly see the other occupants of the room. There we three, other than himself, all clad in the (quite frankly, hideous) orange jumpsuits. Two of them he knew very well.

“Aethelwulf,” Judith moaned, leaning her head back against the wall in a position that mirrored Athelstan’s. “If you don’t shut up, I will seriously- “

“Both of you, please,” Athelstan muttered, exasperated. He loved them, but by God could they be frustrating as all Hell. He was anxious too, but he wasn’t punching the walls. Half of it was probably their anger filtering through onto him, anyway.

Sometimes empathy was a heavy weight to carry.

“What the hell are we going to do?! I don’t- I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this,” Aethelwulf ran out of steam halfway through, finally easing his assault on the wall and dropping onto the bench that jutted out from the wall.

“We just have to wait,” Athelstan assured as best as he could. “I’m sure Ecbert will- “

With a scoff, Aethelwulf cut him off. “My father can pull some strings, but I don’t think even he has this kind of influence, Athelstan,”

Athelstan fell quiet. Instead of replying, he closed his eyes and directed a wave of soothing calm over the room. Judith hummed contentedly, always one to go with the flow no matter where she was.

It didn’t really help their situation, of course, but he could make them all feel a little better. That was what he was good at, and though it was a humble ability, he bore it with pride. He’d forgotten, though, about the stranger sealed in the cell directly to Athelstan’s right. A flash of guilt ran through him; using his empathy without consent wasn’t something he usually did. The apology died on his lips and he sat up straighter, suddenly aware of the eyes on him.

Athelstan couldn’t help but be taken aback as he met a glowing blue gaze. The man was instantly recognisable as a mutant: his skin was pale as chalk, flawless but for the markings (scars, maybe?) that were just about visible on his collarbone where the jumpsuit didn’t cover. The veins on his hands, wrists and neck were glowing faintly beneath the skin. He wore his hair a little strangely, shorn at the sides and braided down his back. The strands -his beard too- shimmered like silver and steel in the pale lighting. It took a conscious effort to stop staring. Physical mutations were common enough, but they rarely presented so egregiously as this.

Somewhat dumbstruck, Athelstan acknowledged that the man was beautiful…almost _ethereal_. He smiled apologetically, but the man just smiled back softly. He was muscular and broad, but hardly seemed like the kind of hardened mutant criminal one might expect to see in these places. In fact… Athelstan almost frowned. He should have noticed it sooner, but he couldn’t get a read on the man.

People were like…ponds. Their emotions could disturb the water, or still it. Make it murky and thick or clear and bright. If people were ponds, this man was a mirror. Totally unmarked and completely untouchable. It must be part of his mutation; Athelstan had encountered unreadable people before. Not quite like this, but the concept was the same.

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to stare,” Athelstan hurried to apologise as soon as he realised he’d been staring at the guy for too long. “My name is Athelstan,” The man cocked his head, and didn’t answer. Maybe he wasn't English?

Mildly put out, Athelstan closed his eyes and breathed. 


	2. The Stout

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Athelstan learns a little more about their situation, and it seems he isn't the only one interested in the stranger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did not expect to write such a long chapter but hey! Hope you guys enjoy!  
> Thank you so much for the feedback on the last chapter, too.

It should have been expected, but Athelstan still jumped when the lights went out, sudden darkness accompanied by the sound of a claxon.

What time was it? There were no windows in their cell: no clock, and not even the sound of patrolling guards outside. Nothing to suggest how time might be passing.

It was unsettling, and Athelstan shuffled further down the plastic board that stuck out from the wall that was supposed to be their crude idea of a bed. It was far from comfortable, digging into his shoulder blades and hip bones so that the skin prickled and ached. Judith’s blooming frustration certainly wasn’t helping.

Athelstan took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, pulling back from his friend so that he had even a chance of getting calm enough to sleep. Aethelwulf was already dead to the world, it seemed, and Athelstan felt his lip twitch in a dry smile.

No matter how much he tried, though, his eyes would not stay shut. There was far too much to think about, but not a whole lot he really wanted to dwell on. So, he distracted himself by tracing the faint lines of the tiles that were illuminated faintly from-

From where?

With a frown, Athelstan propped himself up and scanned the room. There weren’t any other lights, and other than the two ventilation grates, there shouldn’t have been any light in the room at all.

He smiled a little when he noticed the mutant in the cell across from him, hard to miss in the dark as the veins under his pale skin emitted a pale blue glow just bright enough to cast a faint light throughout the room.

Athelstan was grateful for the fact he wouldn’t be spending an unknown number of hours in complete darkness. He’d never really been able to sleep in the dark. He always had a small lamp on in the corner, or the illuminated screen of his laptop to brighten his room at home. 

It seemed, though, that not everybody shared the same thoughts. Judith huffed loudly and twisted on the plastic bench, pounding twice on the Perspex wall of her cell.

“Turn it down, glowstick,” she sneered, eyes hidden in shadow as she scowled. The mutant did not open his eyes, either asleep or uncaring.

“Stop it,” Athelstan admonished quietly, unwilling to break the soft quiet that had previously laid over all of them. They might be in prison, but it was the same kind of night-quiet that muffled the sounds of the MERS library in the evening or amplified his footsteps when he walked in the dark.

Maybe he was projecting that softness, but Judith seemed to relent. “What, you don’t think I could request a move?” She grumbled, tone wry.

“I don’t think our hosts are quite that accommodating,” Athelstan teased, feeling decidedly less alone now that his friends -or one of them, at least- had finished moping.

They talked for a while, about nothing in particular, until he felt sleep come over him. He dreamt of the northern lights and the soft swell of bioluminescent waves.

* * *

Morning (presumably) came with a second claxon and the distinct rattle-and-clang of prison doors. Before Athelstan was even properly awake, the bar cage and door of their room were thrown open, the electronic light to his little cell door blinked red and opened mechanically.

“Breakfast, now,” A guard instructed, not particularly hostile but not kind either as he stood at Athelstan’s door and beckoned him out before moving onto Judith and Aethelwulf. He was so bleary with sleep that its not until a loud ‘thud’ made him jump that he realised there’s a second guard.

“Get the fuck up, mutie!” the guard snarled, roughly manhandling the stranger by his uniform so that he staggered out of the cell, almost tripping on the boot of the first guard, who snickered. The mutant’s glowing eyes narrowed, his jaw clenched, but he followed otherwise silently.

Athelstan swallowed, uncomfortable with the conflict they made so little effort to conceal. Was the hatred of mutants in this place really so strong? Neither he nor Aethelwulf and Judith planned on sticking around her long if they could help it; MERS had protocols for arrests. They just needed to make contact.

But if they can’t find a sympathetic (or corrupt) guard to enable that contact…

The corridor outside of the room was plain and grey, lined with identical doors labelled with just a small numbered plaque. Some of the prisoners that were being shepherded around eyed them with curiosity, disgust, or a mix of both. Athelstan noticed that a good proportion of them radiated a kind of dark feeling he’d come to recognise as prejudice.

Not all of them were mutants.

That had the potential to hurt them. A lot. As a MERS member he was well aware of the statistics: the life expectancy of mutants in a mixed facility was frighteningly low. Nowadays, open anti-mutant violence was frequently seen on the streets. In prison? It ran rampant.

“Not everyone is a mutant,” he informed his friends as quietly as he could, and Aethelwulf’s eyes sharpened.

“Seriously?”

They had to know. Aethelwulf was able to manipulate fire, but he couldn't create it. Judith could influence people's thoughts, but she had to make physical contact. So far, neither of them would have an opportunity to use their powers, let alone use them to give them all an advantage.

A sharp smack of a plastic baton on the wall made his jaw click shut. 

“Quiet,” A guard ordered.

They were ushered like sheep through a veritable fortress of doors and bars into a large room that smelled vaguely of stale bread and dirty ovens. It was lined with long tables and benches: clearly the canteen. As they filed through, irate-looking inmates thrust sloppily filled trays into their hands. Athelstan barely even glanced at the contents; he had no intent to eat this.

He stood beside Aethelwulf and Judith as they paused and scanned the room for an empty space large enough that they could sit and talk without being overheard. The longer they looked, the more hopeless Athelstan felt. This place was overcrowded as it was.

He frowned as he felt a very deliberate nudge to the edges of his sphere of influence. It was coming from an old man that had almost a third of a table to himself. Well-respected, it seemed. He was large and bald, sagging cheeks peppered with greying hair. He must have worn large earrings at some point, because his ear lobes were extremely distended and hung almost down to his shoulders.

The man locked eyes with him and straightened, a clear invitation. Athelstan hesitated before alerting the others. They approached cautiously. As soon as they were close enough to be heard, the man curled his lip in a cold smile.

“You three look as though you could use some help,” he observed, taking a big bite of black toast. Athelstan frowned. Who was this man? A mutant, clearly, but how did he know that Athelstan was an empath?

Aethelwulf cleared his throat and responded with some diplomacy.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think we know you,”

“You don’t need to know me, boy,” the man scoffed. “But I am Olaf. Now, sit,” he gestured to the opposite bench. With slow glances at each other, the three of them took a seat and placed their trays on the table.

Judith spoke first after a long, unsure silence. “Olaf? From the Underground?”

“Mhmm,” Olaf confirmed, though it made little difference to Athelstan. He hadn’t had much of a reason to research the Mutant Underground after they were forcefully disbanded almost a decade ago. Still, if Olaf could get them out…

“And I will help you. Before that…” he paused to take a long, loud swig of black tea.

“You were put with the boy over there, weren’t you? What do you know about him?” Olaf asked, and the distended holes in his ears wobbled as he nodded behind them.

Athelstan turned to look at where the man had gestured. There was a table close to the other door, occupied solely by visibly mutated individuals. There was a man whose hair was replaced by hedgehog-like quills, another with a hunched back and ogre-like underbite. There was one woman with bright red hair and feline eyes and a second with a no hair, but brown snake-like scales all over her body.

Fascinating.

Sure enough, the mutant from Athelstan’s cell had joined them, though he was sat right at the end of the bench and was not communicating with them either. His head was ducked and his eyes closed, jaw set in what looked like concentration. The tips of his fingers were glowing pale blue where his hands rested on the table. Athelstan could have sworn that wasn’t the case earlier. What was he doing?

Athelstan suddenly found himself pinned by a striking blue gaze. The mutant’s lip twitched in something close to a smirk and he cocked his head just like he had before.

“Ugh, creepy,” Judith grimaced, shouldering him and forcing him to tear his eyes away. Aethelwulf hummed in agreement, but Athelstan swallowed and shook his head in response to Olaf’s question.

“Um…we don’t know anything,” he added, “He hasn’t spoken to us,”

Olaf rubbed his warbling neck but left the matter alone. Athelstan wondered what interest he had in the stranger.

Aethelwulf had had enough of their dithering too, clearing his throat obnoxiously loud and leant inwards. “Enough about the weirdo,” he demanded. “So, you think you can help us out?”

The old man nodded with a strange twinkle in his eye.

“I do,”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honestly Olaf is simultaneously one of my favourite and least-favourite characters. He seemed to just sort of appear without much preamble.
> 
> Let me know what you think!


	3. Anomalous

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Athelstan ponders Olaf's words over breakfast, and the stranger in his cell is just as much of a mystery as before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I had 4000 prewritten for this fic, mostly future events that I thought of before I decided to turn it into a full length fic, and my laptop decided to die and corrupted the folder :')  
> Oh well! I got this written, and now I have even more ideas for the future of this fic.
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

After breakfast, they were all gathered and marshalled back down the corridor in the same two-abreast formation as when they went in. It seemed either the company or the food had settled most of the prisoners’ morning frustrations, which made it much easier to open his field of influence to read the guards for some measure of sympathy or…well, corruptness.

Despite trying to focus on this, Athelstan couldn’t help but think over and over Olaf’s words. They had a way out. Connections. All they had to do was find a way to open their cell and set a date. It just seemed like he was missing something.

Judith, who was walking beside him whilst Aethelwulf was in front of them beside the stranger in their cell, must have sensed his apprehension and subtly touched his forearm so that the guards wouldn’t see them make contact.

“What is it? Do you feel something?”

Sometimes, Athelstan’s empathy extended to being able to sense particularly powerful intentions. Especially malice. Yet, he hadn’t gotten so much as a whiff of maliciousness from Olaf. If anything, just a mildly smug kind of pomposity. And a general sense that Olaf knew more than he was letting on, though that wasn’t necessarily from his empathy.

“Not really,” he murmured, “It just seems a little too easy, doesn’t it? We haven’t even been here for 24 hours. It can’t be this simple,”

Aethelwulf audibly huffed and turned his head just enough to let Athelstan know he was glowering.

“Don’t second guess things. You thought the man was honest?” he asked, and Athelstan paused thoughtfully before nodding. Olaf _had_ felt like he was telling the truth, if in a…roundabout way.

“Then leave it alone. Don’t go digging and mess it up,”

Before Athelstan could reply (if only to acquiesce), something happened that he didn’t really see, and in no time at all the relatively still atmosphere exploded in the same way as the corridor.

He was shoved and shouldered as prisoners behind him charged forwards, and took only enough time to grab Judith before plastering the pair of them to the wall in an effort to avoid being literally trampled.

Aethelwulf bumped into him as he too threw himself away from the chaos, and all three of them turned to watch.

“What the fuck?!” Aethelwulf cursed, prompting him to scan the room to find the cause of the sudden violence.

Athelstan winced at the anger, disgust and ugly satisfaction hit him like a brick wall. It was louder to him than the claxon siren and shouting. The slurs kicked up in volume as the guards shoved them all to the side, hurrying from behind to try and break up the rowdy prisoners.

He wasn’t much one for violence and tried to stay as clear away from it as possible, but when he felt his empathy glance off something, he realized why people were getting riled up and couldn’t help but freeze.

The other mutant from his cell was on the ground, curled up to defend as best as he could against the multitudes of heavy-booted feet that kicked and stomped at him. His lip was split, or his nose bleeding (or both), but it took Athelstan a moment to realize that that was what was happening, because the blood was bright, luminescent blue. The colour of bioluminescent waves.

Despite the ferocity of the attack, the mutant didn’t make a sound. He barely looked like he was in pain, and as the guards finally managed to settle the crowd (too late not to be deliberate, Athelstan found himself disliking the guards more and more every moment he spent in this place) he simply got to his feet and stared blankly into the eyes of the officer that checked to make sure he wasn’t about to keel over.

“Freak,” the guard spat, giving the mutant an overly harsh shove. He stumbled, smearing the bright blood on the ground beneath his boot.

“Get the fuck back to your cells!” somebody else roared, and the prisoners that weren’t being pinned or arrested by guards began to shuffle off, quieted by the ruckus and hoping to avoid registering as a further bug on the guards’ radar.

Athelstan joined them after sharing a final, wide-eyed glance with Aethelwulf and Judith. What the hell had happened? They were _right_ beside the guy…they should have seen something go off.

They were all silent on the way back to the cell, and Athelstan was glad to slip inside out of sight. The doors to their individual capsules remained unlocked, so he assumed that they had a little more freedom during the day.

The three of them elected to sit together in Judith’s cell, but nobody said a word. It was nice to just sit and…process together. They had time for planning later.

Athelstan couldn’t withdraw his attention from the stranger, looking through the Perspex to where he was sat against the wall in his cell, legs crossed, and arms pressed firmly over his stomach. They rose and fell with ragged breath, and his eyes were closed. Without the ability to read him, Athelstan couldn’t tell if he was in a lot of pain. Nevertheless, he extended his field of influence and projected a nameless feeling that he’d discovered in the MERS clinic that mimicked the effects of painkillers.

As he leant back and closed his own eyes, Athelstan became accustomed to the quiet and when his heartbeat was no longer so loud in his ears, he thought he could hear the shudder smooth out in that quiet breath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I recently watched 'The Act' based on the story of Gypsy-Rose Blanchard and have an idea for a Munchausen-by-Proxy (or factitious disorder imposed on another) fic, but I'm not sure if it's something that other people would want to read. If you are interested, let me know!
> 
> I hope you guys enjoyed this chapter!

**Author's Note:**

> ...I don't know about anybody else, but I have a firm headcanon that Ragnar is autistic and some ficlet ideas to go with that...I would seriously LOVE any prompts for that!
> 
> Anyhoo, please do comment and let me know what you think! Should I continue? 
> 
> Hope you had fun reading!


End file.
